When I was a child, a long time ago, I was forced to memorize this poem in its entirety, written by the British poet William Wordsworth. I had to memorize many things written by British people, since the place I was born and grew up in was owned by the British, but for a reason not known to me then, of all the things I had to memorize, I took an ill feeling to this piece of literature. And why should that have been so? Let me show you a picture of the little black-skinned girl, with hair strands curlier than wool, an imagination too vivid for the world into which I was born, my mind (whatever that meant and means) shining new and good, certainly good enough to know that there were things it was not allowed to know. The daffodil, for one: What was a daffodil, I wanted to know, since such a thing did not grow in the tropics.

In my child’s mind’s eye, the poem and its contents (though not its author) and the people through whom it came were repulsive. I had no rational or just way of arranging and separating the people who created the things to memorize from the people who made me memorize wonderful things, whether they were about daffodils, heaven and hell or just the river Thames. And so for me, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” became not an individual vision coolly astonishing the mind’s eye but the tyrannical order of a people, the British people, in my child’s life.

And yet, given all of that, what has the daffodil become to me, for memory is not set, no matter how we wish it to be so, and the past will intrude on the present new and fresh. I now live in a climate that has four seasons. When I was a child and memorizing the British literary canon, I lived in a climate of eternal summer, and the reality that, in England, four different climates existed filled me with sadness, succeeded by longing and, inevitably, curiosity.

Last fall I planted, without qualms, 2,000 daffodil bulbs, ‘Rijnveld’s Early Sensation’, in my lawn. This cultivar came on the market in the 1940s, and it is the only one I can find in any catalogue that brings to my mind that host that danced in the breeze. For 20 years now I have lived in Vermont, a state that falls in a climate suitable for this genus. For many of those 20 years I have gone back and forth with the daffodil: I love it, I do not love it. But I live in this place where there is true spring, a place where the four seasons repeat themselves one after the other in the usual order and the sight of the daffodil is a true joy. In any case, I view spring itself as such pleasure that I have come to believe that the earth and its workings are meant to result in this season, spring.

The 2,000 daffodils have joined 3,500. That is a little more than half of 10,000, but my aim is not Wordsworth’s number, my aim is to cover my entire lawn and beyond that every nook and cranny that will receive some sun. I want to walk out into my yard, unable to move at will because my feet are snarled in the graceful long green stems supporting bent yellow flowering heads of daffodils. I will not have to come upon them suddenly; I have planted them myself, dug (with some help from a man named Paul) the 200 holes myself, placing 10 in each hole, making sure the holes are lined up just so for a visual show.

Somewhere I read that Wordsworth worried about misreadings of his poem. It can’t be that he worried about the uses to which his countrymen would employ the product of his genius (they were busy trading slaves, not educating them). I believe it possible, though, that with his sensibility, so finely tuned to the unknown in the human realm, so finely tuned to our universal confusions and misunderstandings, he was, when worrying about misreadings, thinking of someone like me. There is no record as far as I can tell of Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, frantically planting daffodils anywhere hoping to be in touch again with that moment when they came upon them on their walk in the woods.

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